Manage your subscription

Feedback

What is going on at the Cabinet Office? In July the new boy, Chief Scientific
Adviser Bill Stewart, held a press conference (not attended by New Scientist)
to release the annual review of government R&D. It was all pretty routine
stuff, apart from one off-the-record session in which Stewart told the journalists
he would not object if they looked on him as an unofficial science minister.
John Major, he said, had strengthened his role, giving him the power to
coordinate research across Whitehall and liaise with the Treasury over the
forthcoming round of public spending. Chief scientists have done this sort
of thing before, but Stewart was saying that he had the Prime Minister’s
authority to be tougher.

If all this is so, and Stewart’s department does have the sort of beef
implied by comparisons to a science ministry, why not say it publicly? The
Cabinet Office still says that nothing has changed. Can it be a coincidence
that a general election is looming and the Labour Party is calling for a
science minister based in the Cabinet Office? Does the government want to
undermine Labour’s claim to offer a better deal for science yet make few,
if any, changes in reality. Discreet inquiries in Whitehall have failed
to produce anyone who has noticed a change since Stewart came to power.

* * *

John Collier, the boss of Nuclear Electric, Britain’s biggest nuclear
generator, last week told the press that the state-owned company would not
indulge in ‘PR hype’ to persuade the general public of the virtues of ‘clean’,
greenhouse-friendly fission power. Strangely, he didn’t thank the Department
of Energy for its help in the fight against hype.

Last month, the department’s mandarins stamped on Nuclear Electric’s
planned £7 million prime-time television advertising campaign extolling
the mighty atom and the good job the company was doing. The heartless civil
servants pulled the plug on the venture, saying it would be ‘inappropriate’.
Film costing £1 million to shoot was already in the can.

And now, not in the spirit of hype, guess which of Nuclear Electric’s
plants performed best last year, increasing its rating by 25 per cent. Since
you ask, it was Maentwrog.

Maentwrog? That doesn’t sound like one of the nuclear stations. No,
it isn’t. It happens to be the generator’s only hydroelectric plant. As
well as maintaining the level of the inland lake which provides cooling
water for the Trawsfyndd Magnox station, it produces a bit of electricity
for the national grid. A very green and environmentally friendly 30 megawatts.

* * *

Why does everyone keep having a go at NASA? Here is one reason. The
US’s only weather satellite is about to wear out. The replacement is three
years behind schedule, $500 million over budget and no better than the
one it replaces. As a result, the US is considering buying a Japanese satellite
one-tenth the cost of their own instead. Now comes the bad bit. The Japanese
satellite is actually made by the American company which built the original
weather satellite which is about to wear out.

* * *

Astronomers gathered on the summit of the extinct Hawaiian volcano Mauna
Kea to study the solar eclipse on 11 July got more than they bargained for.
Just after ‘totality’, the adjacent dormant volcano Mauna Loa coughed into
life with a minor eruption. Coincidence? Perhaps not, since there is an
increasingly respectable body of evidence which suggests that some volcanic
eruptions and earthquakes can be triggered by ‘tides’ in the solid Earth
and tidal forces are at their most extreme, of course, when the Sun and
Moon are perfectly aligned when viewed from Earth, as they must be during
an eclipse. It did leave just a few eclipse watchers wondering whether they
might be better advised to study the next eclipse from more solid ground.

* * *

The theory of morphic resonance continues to, well, echo down the years.
Two students in England and one in Australia have just won $5000 (American)
for devising scientific tests of Rupert Sheldrake’s controversial theory,
awarded by the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California. If progress can
be measured by the prizes, the theory that all natural systems – including
people – inherit a collective memory of their kind through the process called
morphic resonance, must be gaining ground. The first competition for a test
of morphic resonance was in 1983, with a prize of £250, sponsored,
naturally, by New Scientist.

* * *

A cemetery in Padua recently set aside an area reserved for people who
had died of AIDS. It did so under a law, dating from Napoleon, saying victims
of infectious disease must be sponged with disinfectant, placed in sturdy
coffins and buried apart from corpses that died of ‘natural’ causes (such
as, at the time, tuberculosis). Three cheers for a Paduan doctor, Leopoldo
Salmaso, who launched a successful public protest against ‘postmortem discrimination’.
The cemetery is now open to all comers.

* * *

But recalling that archaeologists excavating 200-year-old crypts in
London recently thought it prudent to renew their smallpox vaccinations,
just in case, might it not be considerate to future archaeologists to inscribe
coffins, very blackly on the lid, with their occupants’ infectious and possibly
long-lived causes of death? Archaeologists might well be among the few in
the future who can afford an AIDS vaccine.

But now that the World Health Organization has completed its much-trumpeted
eradication of smallpox by convincing the US Army to destroy its last stocks
of the virus, where are poor archaeologists going to get their shots?